New Features in Joomla! 2.5

With the release of Joomla! 2.5, the user community has placed a large emphasis on making the CMS installation and updates management process as simple and straightforward as possible.

Easy Updates

The automated notification of Joomla! core and extension updates is a new built-in feature that simplifies site maintenance and management of updates:

Available as a quick button on the administrative control panel of your Joomla! website, it enables administrators to update a site to the latest stable Joomla! release with just a single click.

A second quick button handles updates for Joomla! extensions.

A major usability enhancement, this auto-updating feature eliminates the need to manually transfer and replace files on the server, converting a time-consuming, error-prone process into a seamless, effective, and time-saving experience.

Smart Search

This new functionality offers a faster, more user-friendly search experience for your visitors. It features natural language search with auto-completion and stemming, which allows the user to find relevant content by just typing the first several letters of a word.

Designed for versatility and speed, this native Joomla! component + plugins set gives you one-click automated indexing of all content items, categories, weblinks, contacts, newsfeeds, etc. It offers a large array of configurable options, including result description length, url length, and date filters.

Multi-Database Support

Multiple database support is a new feature that makes it possible to run the Joomla! CMS on many different databases, not just MySQL and MySQLi. This facilitates integration and update management processes. Joomla! now allows different drivers to be written that will support different versions of SQL databases. Current drivers exist for the MySQL and MS SQL databases, with PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite and PDO drivers close to being ready.